Sword-days, red days, and sunrises

Page 2 of 227

For me, memorial parks are more like golf courses: manicured lawns, sprinklers, the reception area with marble floors and columns. The memorial park is like a slice of white-picket-fences America, lined with stunted and balding alder trees to give the burial grounds a more suburban, refined feel.

Before all of this, though, there was the venerable sementeryo.

I’m never sure about what to call “cemeteries” in the Philippines: as with a lot of things here, the Western ideal takes a whole new meaning. The Filipino graveyard is as much about life as it is about death: people do live in shacks in the graveyard, mausoleums become homes for caretakers and undertakers and gravediggers and their families. On All Saints’ Day, the land of the dead becomes everything in the land of the living: a marketplace, a picnic area, a park, a playground. A casket can become a photo booth (or at least one enterprising funeral home thought of that brilliant idea), just as the tombs in the front of the cemetery become sari-sari stores.

Far from the “Six Feet Under” feel of memorial parks, or notions of “the family plot.”

A few days ago, Vice President Jejomar Binay took to the lectern of the PICC, and delivered what was – at least to his spokespersons and his most ardent supporters – a speech that was “presidential” in tone. It had all the trimmings of what many of us would call “presidential:” the tableau, the motif, the somber cadence of Binay addressing the nation. Except for the cheers of his supporters, chanting his name. So much for the presidential tone: anyone who still doubts Binay’s clear intentions to run for President at that point is either deprived of reason, or deprived of the senses.

While most of us would complain that the substance of Binay’s speech was lacking (if anything, Binay dodged and redirected accusations, rather than answer them outright), that would be somehow missing the point. Binay’s political success – and his rise to power – was never predicated on the desire of an educated middle class for transparency and accountability, but on the message that resonates with the downtrodden majority.

Sec. Jun Abaya’s right: he shouldn’t be offering excuses on the state of the MRT. But there’s a difference between offering and making them.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the MRT may not be the rotten deathtrap that many people paint it to be. Maybe people just don’t have the right metaphors for a very uncomfortable form of public transit. There’s always the overcrowded bus on a congested major highway, for example. Or prohibitively expensive taxi cabs. Or one may just consider buying a car.

But here’s thing: Sec. Abaya asks, why would anyone put up with it? Sec. Abaya claims that if ordinary people put up with it, there should be no reason why it’s “bulok.” Sec. Abaya also propounds that if you spruce up the MRT, you can even turn it into a tourist attraction.

There – with all the benefit of the doubt given up to this point – is the problem. A sense of being out of touch.

Vice Ganda is right: not all who protest are really out there protesting. Some of them were just paid to protest. Some of them were just bribed; perhaps to buy a few kilos of rice for their trouble.

But there’s the rub: that’s the cost of dissent in this country.

I don’t think that Vice was being “elitist” or anything; everyone has the right to opinions, and there’s a lot to be admired in frank comments when everyone’s walking on eggshells. What it was to me, for all it was to me, is a betrayal of biases. There’s a big difference between people being on the take for dissenting, and how much is paid for that dissent.

In doing so, Vice Ganda reveals that we don’t put a lot of stock in our individual actions to move this country forward. In saying so, Vice Ganda also reveals that it has gotten to the point that the price of protest – for those of us who should protest – can be paid for in the form of rice. And in spreading so, Vice Ganda reveals that this is the quality of questioning we like: divisive ones, and not constructive ones.